PARIS February — LES ENLUMINURES (www.lesenluminures.com) is exhibiting again this year at the renowned NEW YORK ANTIQUARIAN BOOK FAIR April 11 - 14 at the Park Avenue (67th Street) Armory.

LES ENLUMINURES founder and owner Dr. Sandra Hindman says, “We have taken a large stand at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair this year to showcase a number of very important Books of Hours, chronicles, and text manuscripts we have acquired. The book fair takes place at the same time as a show we are staging at our New York gallery, “PATHS TO REFORM which illustrates the importance of reform in the history of the medieval and early modern church and includes about 35 manuscripts that illustrate texts from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries. The show in the gallery will run from April 4 to May 4.”

Dr. Sandra Hindman says visitors to the NEW YORK ANTIQUARIAN BOOK FAIR will be delighted to see an exceptional English Calendar and Almanac from Yorkshire, dated c1425 that includes 136 pen drawings of the calendar as well as a full-page pen drawing of a zodiacal man, a pictorial chronicle of the kings of England, a pictorial world history, animals, beehives, wheat fields, tools, moons, churches, ships, shipwrecks and fires.

“This manuscript is one of a small coherent group of about four late fourteenth and early fifteenth-century calendar-almanacs, all of which are full of charts, tables, and colorful pictograms. They testify to the emergence of a different class of book-owners - well-to-do farmhands and country doctors - in northern England at a time when the boundary between literate and non-literate readers was increasingly blurred. The present codex is closest to a so-called Physician’s Almanac in London in the British Library (Harley MS 2332).”

“We are also planning to inaugurate a new series of small catalogues for the first time at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair that we are calling “Primers.” Each will introduce different genres of text manuscripts: the first, on Sermons, will be available in the Spring at the book fair and the next one, on Alchemy, in September. The third catalogue on Law will be published in December.

“These Primers aim to show how different types of Sermons - largely unstudied and often unpublished -- functioned in everyday life during the Middle Ages to teach the people about spiritual life and the Bible. One unusual example is a Chess manuscript used in preaching. Written by a Dominican preacher and taken directly from his Sermons, the game of Chess serves as an allegory for the behavior of people at all levels of society - from thieves to farmers to kings and queens.”

Sandra Hindman, who twice headed the Art History Department at Northwestern University during her 30-year academic career, founded Les Enluminures gallery in Paris 22 years ago when she opened a gallery opposite the Louvre. Last year she expanded her business to include a second gallery in an historic New York townhouse at 23 East 73rd Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues.

Les Enluminures is among a handful of top ranked sources for the most significant Medieval manuscripts and art entering the market and numbers among its clients the world’s most major museums, libraries and private collectors. Each year Les Enluminures is a featured exhibitor at prestigious antiques and art fairs in New York, Paris, Florence, San Francisco, Maastricht and London.

Hindman divides her time between her Paris gallery and her offices in Chicago and has written a dozen books and catalogues on the subject.